Exercise: Nonconformity, (posibly fun), (possibly curiosity); watch or read from somehting VERY far out of your target demograpic.
Examples: Twilight, My Little Pony Friendship is magic, the Quran. (Note: I have only watched MLP of these examples, and can confirm it will surprise you by being great. For the other two I get an instinctive revulsion saying “that can’t POSSIBLY be anything other than slow torture” in spite of knowing taking the outside view says otherwise, which is exactly why I should watch/read from them if I were to do this exercise)
Twilight is tolerable. The setup is quite good, but wasted (vampire politics are glossed over in favor of Bella’s heartbeat). If you want to see what can be done with it go read Alicorn’s Luminosity (discussion thread) which starts out a decent pamphlet for luminosity, then drops it and turns into a good book. (As in, not by the standards of online fanfic. By the standards of books.)
Twilight itself is just your usual crappy romance novel. It finds a few emotional buttons (danger, lust, beauty, resisting attraction, the high of infatuation) and presses them like a monkey on crack. It’s quite possible to enjoy that. Secondary characters, while rather flat, are appealing—for example Carlisle Cullen’s virtues can be genuinely moving.
I say grab it if you have time to waste, if the first five minutes bore you drop it, otherwise finish it.
Apologetics! Christian devotional material! The Screwtape Letters is remarkably insightful as a guide to noticing pitfalls in your own thinking and behavior, and it’s probably not the only thing in the entire genre worth reading.
The Screwtape Letters is remarkably insightful as a guide to noticing pitfalls in your own thinking and behavior, and it’s probably not the only thing in the entire genre worth reading.
I have fond memories of The Screwtape Letters. I could never work out why my fellow believers raved over the author’s other work (Mere Christianity) instead. The latter didn’t even inspire me enough to finish the second half.
My experience reading the Quran (I’ve only read a few percent so far) has been comparable to my experience reading the Bible. Both are rather poetic, in different ways, but the content is only occasionally useful. I genuinely enjoyed reading the Analects and the Tao Te Ching, however, as the wisdom seemed more densely concentrated and more applicable.
Haven’t read either of these, and what you are saying fits with my previous expectations. I were going to say the bible first but I figured many might have already read it.
Remember the point of the exercise is not to read somehting that’s good and you’ve planed to read sometime. It’s to read somehting you think is horrible and people will look funny at you for reading… but that you are wrong about.
This is obviously impossible to do on purpose in any straightforward way, but I have this feeling that the rationalist masters have a few clever tricks to get around that paradox...
Some data to fill in the gaps in Armok’s: I read Twilight with an effort to have an open mind about it. I slightly enjoyed the first three books as romance novels, then the end of the fourth was utterly worthless. Then I noticed the ideas behind the first three books, which were bad. So the series in general is ok, but only if you don’t look at it very hard (Luminosity, on the other hand, is good).
I haven’t read the Koran, but the scattered parts of the Bible I’ve read were relatively boring. There are a lot of rules, procedures, genealogies, and distorted history that are really only of interest if one believes the religion.
Have you read Luminosity? It might make Twilight more palatable if you started with that as an introduction to the background concepts. (Or it would make Twilight less palatable because it’s worse by comparison or something, I’m not sure how this works for you.)
The link to Luminosity is in my reading list. I may or may not get around to it before the singularity but probably not for many years either way. I won’t be reading Twilight unless I find some specific reason to believe doing so would fill some specific purpose I don’t know needs filled yet, since I have way, way to much stuff to read in all categories… Even if I want somehting specifically deliberately bad with actual research I can probably optimize even better for that as well.
Because of Luminosity I did pick up and start reading a Twilight book (second one I think) when I was at the library. It was better than I expected, the quality of the writing was definitely good, but it got a bit repetitious, in terms of the sighing softly and the drama and the not being a vampire.
Exercise: Nonconformity, (posibly fun), (possibly curiosity); watch or read from somehting VERY far out of your target demograpic.
Examples: Twilight, My Little Pony Friendship is magic, the Quran. (Note: I have only watched MLP of these examples, and can confirm it will surprise you by being great. For the other two I get an instinctive revulsion saying “that can’t POSSIBLY be anything other than slow torture” in spite of knowing taking the outside view says otherwise, which is exactly why I should watch/read from them if I were to do this exercise)
Twilight is tolerable. The setup is quite good, but wasted (vampire politics are glossed over in favor of Bella’s heartbeat). If you want to see what can be done with it go read Alicorn’s Luminosity (discussion thread) which starts out a decent pamphlet for luminosity, then drops it and turns into a good book. (As in, not by the standards of online fanfic. By the standards of books.)
Twilight itself is just your usual crappy romance novel. It finds a few emotional buttons (danger, lust, beauty, resisting attraction, the high of infatuation) and presses them like a monkey on crack. It’s quite possible to enjoy that. Secondary characters, while rather flat, are appealing—for example Carlisle Cullen’s virtues can be genuinely moving.
I say grab it if you have time to waste, if the first five minutes bore you drop it, otherwise finish it.
Apologetics! Christian devotional material! The Screwtape Letters is remarkably insightful as a guide to noticing pitfalls in your own thinking and behavior, and it’s probably not the only thing in the entire genre worth reading.
I have fond memories of The Screwtape Letters. I could never work out why my fellow believers raved over the author’s other work (Mere Christianity) instead. The latter didn’t even inspire me enough to finish the second half.
My experience reading the Quran (I’ve only read a few percent so far) has been comparable to my experience reading the Bible. Both are rather poetic, in different ways, but the content is only occasionally useful. I genuinely enjoyed reading the Analects and the Tao Te Ching, however, as the wisdom seemed more densely concentrated and more applicable.
Haven’t read either of these, and what you are saying fits with my previous expectations. I were going to say the bible first but I figured many might have already read it.
Remember the point of the exercise is not to read somehting that’s good and you’ve planed to read sometime. It’s to read somehting you think is horrible and people will look funny at you for reading… but that you are wrong about.
This is obviously impossible to do on purpose in any straightforward way, but I have this feeling that the rationalist masters have a few clever tricks to get around that paradox...
I started watching MLP earlier today, and it is surprisingly good. Watch it on youtube here.
Some data to fill in the gaps in Armok’s: I read Twilight with an effort to have an open mind about it. I slightly enjoyed the first three books as romance novels, then the end of the fourth was utterly worthless. Then I noticed the ideas behind the first three books, which were bad. So the series in general is ok, but only if you don’t look at it very hard (Luminosity, on the other hand, is good).
I haven’t read the Koran, but the scattered parts of the Bible I’ve read were relatively boring. There are a lot of rules, procedures, genealogies, and distorted history that are really only of interest if one believes the religion.
You’re the third person this past week to tell me how good My Little Pony is.
Yea, in some circles it’s actually all the rage, but I’m counting on it still being controversial in most of meatspace for at least a few more months.
Have you read Luminosity? It might make Twilight more palatable if you started with that as an introduction to the background concepts. (Or it would make Twilight less palatable because it’s worse by comparison or something, I’m not sure how this works for you.)
The link to Luminosity is in my reading list. I may or may not get around to it before the singularity but probably not for many years either way. I won’t be reading Twilight unless I find some specific reason to believe doing so would fill some specific purpose I don’t know needs filled yet, since I have way, way to much stuff to read in all categories… Even if I want somehting specifically deliberately bad with actual research I can probably optimize even better for that as well.
Because of Luminosity I did pick up and start reading a Twilight book (second one I think) when I was at the library. It was better than I expected, the quality of the writing was definitely good, but it got a bit repetitious, in terms of the sighing softly and the drama and the not being a vampire.
The last one has a very good now-Bella-is-a-vampire scene, which I sometimes reread all by itself.
Oh, okay. That last one was just to fill out the rule of three anyhow :P